One girl's salt is another girl's fleur de sel

June 04, 2012

Last summer I spent several weeks working on recipes with the inimitable Sara Boswell, sorghum scientist and vintage goddess, and the results are here, in this ebook (note: I am uncredited as I wrote it while an employee of Enjoy Life Foods).

The donut recipes, a joint effort between the two of us, are by far my favorites.

The pumpkin donut is especially tasty:

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake Donuts

Makes 4 large or 6 small cake donuts

These not-too-sweet pumpkin donuts will fool even the most discerning donut eater. They’re light, fluffy and delicious and we loved them when they’re simply dipped in sugar glaze. As with the other donuts, the key to making these come out just right is mixing the donuts as we recommend below and not adding the baking soda until the very end.

Grease the donut pan with a very thin coating of palm oil and dust the oil with sorghum flour. This will allow the donut to de-pan easily.

Mix dry ingredients except for baking soda together. Cream honey, sugar, and palm oil in a bowl, then mix in pumpkin puree. The mixture will be streaky – don’t worry. Mix in ½ the dry ingredients including the spices (except the baking soda) followed by the rice milk and the remaining ½ of the dry ingredients (except the baking soda). Fold in the “tapioca egg” 1 tablespoon at a time and mix thoroughly. Add apple cider vinegar to the mixture. Once that is mixed in, incorporate the baking soda. Fold in the chocolate chips then pour batter into prepared donut pan.

Bake at 375 for 15-17 minutes.

Dip into sugar glaze while still warm and place on wire rack. Excess glaze can be returned to the pan and reused.

If baking ahead, freeze un-iced donuts as soon as they cool. Decorate before serving.

Sugar Glaze

2 cups confectioner’s sugar

2 T water + 1 T water if too stiff

1 t vanilla (optional)

In the bowl of a food processor, mix the confectioner’s sugar until free of lumps (you can skip the mixing step if yours is lump-free). Add water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the mixture is smooth. If using vanilla, add it while the mixture is still lumpy to avoid making the mixture too thin.

If using this to coat donuts, stir mixture just as donuts are coming out of the oven and pour over top of donuts set on a wire rack a minute after they have come out. The excess glaze can be reused.

May 19, 2011

When I was in culinary school, one of my classmates from Virginia always fell back on the same recipe whenever she was responsible for coming up with the dessert special: chocolate peanut butter pie. As a fan of chocolate and peanut butter, I found the combination - and in a pie, no less - irresistible. It was homey and rich and satisfying.

Cut to 2011. Food allergies, especially peanut allergies, are way up. Gluten intolerance is on the rise. Chocolate peanut butter pie is off limits to many. So what's a girl to do?

Make a vegan chocolate sunbutter-chocolate pie, that's what.

This is a fairly easy recipe with not many ingredients. It works like a charm. You'll need to make my much adored tapioca gel as the base for this, and the results will look strange at first, but the resulting pie filling is custard-smooth.

Cake and Commerce's Fudgy Chocolate Sunbutter Pie (vegan and free of the top 8 allergens)

Empty bag of chips into a medium-sized bowl (make sure they are mini because larger ones will not melt fast enough. If you only have large chips, break them up in a food processor first). Combine tapioca flour and cold water in saucepan and bring to a near boil. The solution will turn translucent and sticky. Pour immediately over chocolate, stirring constantly, until all chocolate is melted. The mixture will be very lumpy and bumpy – don’t fret! Immediately whisk the sunbutter into the mixture – it should start to look smooth, although a little grainy. Stir in the vanilla and the agave, if desired. Pour into prepared pie crust.

Top with chocolate chips, extra crumbs, and roasted sunflower seed pieces, if desired.

Leave in the refrigerator overnight, or until set, about 3 hours.

Serve cold or at room temperature. To store, tightly cover with plastic wrap and store in refrigerator. Keeps up to four days.

May 15, 2011

I've been eating brown rice pasta since this blog was founded about 5 years ago. And I've always liked it. Not as much as I like the chewy, toothsome texture of wheat pasta, but I find that if I drowned it in enough sauce, I can fool almost anyone. Except when I reheat it.* There is no mistaking the gummy texture of reheated rice pasta. But I recently discovered a trick that significantly improves the texture, performance, and speed of cooking of brown rice pasta. And allows reheating (though microwave cooking more than a few seconds will still gum it up a bit). And I learned it from a book.

By chance, The other day during a long plane ride I read the remarkably enjoyable and enlightening book, Ideas in Food, the print version of the much loved pro-chef blog, Ideas in Food by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot. If you love to cook and haven't read this book, I can't recommend it enough. Although many of the insights are around techniques and concepts that may be alien to some home cooks, their advice and insight is inspiring and may get you to try out things you'd otherwise not consider.

One simple idea from their book has completely changed the way I prepare brown rice pasta. On page 116 of their book, (or, in fewer details, this page on their blog), Talbot and Kamozawa explain how to quickly cook pasta - cutting cooking time in half, if not more - by soaking pasta in cold water for 1-2 hours before cooking (they hold the hydtrating pasta and water in a Ziploc-type bag). The hydrated pasta can then be stored in the refrigerator for up to 3 days. The pasta can then be quickly cooked in boiling water for 1-5 minutes, depending on the duration of the soak. It is a great trick for restaurants, which often par-cook their pasta before service with mixed results. Pre-hydrated pasta cooks up fresh and chewy, and the long soak in cold water prevents sticking in the water and reduces sticking during storage, so less boiling water is needed to get perfect pasta. Think of the pot of water you boil for a pasta dinner, now imagine that water reduced by more than half. The time required to boil that smaller pot is significantly less than that large pot of water. Voila, you just got a few hours of your life back.

Talbot and Kamozawa then make the hydration even more compelling by introducing a flavorful soaking liquid. They tried out mushroom stock and clam broth as the soaking medium for the pasta, and both yeilded excellent results. They also found that they could roast it in the oven prior to soaking, and that leaving dry pasta for a two-hour stint in the smoker resulted in a savory, flavorful finished dish.

So how does a chapter and a blog post on wheat pasta translate into meaningful gluten-free food prep?

Well, what applies to wheat also applies to rice, with some modifications.

Wheat hydrates much more quickly than rice does, by a factor of about .5, or 50% more quickly. So rice pasta needs a longer soak to reduce cooking time. Wheat doesn't mush up quite as much as rice does, so rice requires a second cold water rinse after cooking. But for spaghettis made of either grain, a one hour hydration vastly improves the texture of pasta. And the cold water soak helps reduce the amount of starch on the surface of the pasta, making it much less sticky as it cooks.

After a one hour soak, spaghetti-style rice pasta is slightly more flexible than raw pasta but still brittle. Cooking to al dente at this point reduces boiling time from 15 minutes to 4 minutes, and only a small fraction of the water recommended by the manufacturer is needed. After 1.5 hours, the pasta was much softer and flexible though it broke when bent. After two hours, the spaghetti could be bent without breaking. It was al dente, though I'd not want to eat it raw. At 2.5 hours, the pasta is al dente and is extremely flexible, but it cooks almost too fast and gets mushy quickly. All of the pastas, once drained and sealed in a Ziploc-type bag and refrigerated continued to soften as the water migrated to the dryer center of the pasta strand. The softening was perceptible in the raw pasta but did not negatively impact the finished texture.

I prefered the 1 hour or 1.5 hour soak over the hydrating soaks of longer duration. Even though 1-1.5 hour soaks required a longer cook time, it was easier to control the cooking time and texture and the pasta was slightly less sticky. I fed the results to a friend and he agreed that the al dente pieces reminded him more of the wheat pasta and that the gummier mushy pasta was definitely not like wheat pasta at all.

Once the pasta is cooked and cooled in cold water, it can be wrapped in an airtight container or bag and stored in the refrigerator up to three days and reheated. The results will be excellent.

Other pasta shapes - penne, macaroni, rigatoni, sprials - will require more hydration time. Two hours is usually enough.

My takeaway is that any amount of hydration will improve cooking time. Even if you can only hydrate the pasta while you wait for your pasta water to heat up, you will reduce your cooking time.

Can hydration be accelerated? I don't like sticky pasta, though. What else can I do?

Well, there's not a ton you can do about stickiness. Rice pasta is rice pasta, though as you'll see below, you can do a few things that will help it become the best pasta it can be given its inherent limitations.

I decided to try out another technique to see if I could further improve the process without affecting texture. I had read in Ideas in Food about the par-cooking of rice for risotto. They explain how starch absorbs water thusly:

"When we cook rice or potatoes in hot water, the starch granules soak up the water and swell to the point of bursting, or gelatinize. The more water is absorbed, the lower the gelantinization temperature. If the starch does not cook long enough to absorb enough water, it will not completely gelatinize."

-Talbot and Kamozawa, Ideas in Food, page 120

One of the problems with rice-based pastas is they get gummy fast, that is, rice pasta gels and gets sticky when cooked because the cell walls of the starch (mostly amylopectin, with a low but appreciable amount of amylose) burst when cooked. If a starch can undergo retrogradation (a process that is responsible for the staling of bread but also the reinforcement of starch cell walls, a good thing for rice pasta and potatoes), some of this sticky/gummy texture can be remedied. But rice is generally low in amylose, one of the keys in retrogradation. The amylopectin fraction of rice starch forms crystals as it cools that melt as it is heated up. Anyone who has eaten cold rice before reheating it has experienced this. Rice pasta is similarly grainy when cold.

Rice pasta, however, is not rice. Unlike rice, rice pasta is heat-extruded and dried, meaning its chemical composition is quite different from that of dried rice. According to this study from Cereal Science (published in 2000), heated and extruded pasta that is cooked and then kept in refrigeration will undergo rapid but low levels of retrogradation - meaning that stickiness cannot be completely eliminated from rice pasta but that it can be reduced to a minor but perceptible extent.

But here's the good news: you can both speed up the hydration of the pasta AND (mostly? somewhat?) conquer stickiness with a process that's a little fussy but not difficult.

METHOD

Rice gelantinizes at 150-170 degrees, depending on the type of rice used. I don't know what kind of rice is used in brown rice pasta, but I assumed that because the starch molecule was damaged in heating and extruding, the gelatinization temperature should be lower. If rice pasta is cooked somewhere around that temperature, I reasoned, maybe I could use retrogradation to my advantage by gelatinizing the starch without bursting the molecule.

I heated water on the stove to 155F. I put the uncooked dry rice pasta in the 155F water for 20 minutes, until it was soft. I immediately plunged it in cold water to chill it down completely. At this point the pasta could have been refrigerated up to three days. I then boiled water and put the par-cooked pasta in for 30 seconds. That's right. 30 seconds. I then drained it and plunged it into cold water. I put it in a bag and put that bag in the refrigerator and checked it every five minutes.

And guess what?

The pasta wasn't sticky at all. It didn't stick to my hands or to itself. It was a little tacky, but significantly less than it does from a straight boil or even from the pre-hydration method. Of course it still got a little crunchy and sticky over time in the refrigerator, but not to the extent I had experienced before. And the texture was much more toothsome and - dare I say it - similar to wheat pasta.

And it tasted really good.

Here's the summary of what I did:

Parcook pasta 20 mins in 155F salted water > chill down in cold water and drain > Boil for 30 seconds > Chill in cold water and drain > use immediately OR refrigerate up to 3 days

Buckwheat Soba

I wondered how the soak would affect buckwheat pasata, or Soba. I love soba - it is easily one of my favorite noodles. I've almost never liked the ubiquitous-in-the-US dry soba as the texture never seemed quite right to me. From time to time I've purchased fresh frozen soba noodles, but they're expensive and available only at specialty markets. By contrast, dry soba is available almost anywhere that has an international section with Japanese or Korean ingredients, including Whole Foods. Not all soba is 100% buckwheat, so read the label carefully before purchasing or you may inadvertently glutenize yourself.

I soaked the (Roland Brand, purchased at Whole Foods) buckwheat soba in cold water and checked it every five minutes. Because it is thin and fine, and buckwheat is highly water absorbent, after twenty minutes it was soft and hydrated. If broken, it looked al dente. I was worried it would be sticky, as cooked dry soba often is. I rinsed it just before plunging it into boiling water and cooked it for 1 minute. I removed it from the water, gave it a quick cold-water rinse and tasted it.

It was the best dried soba I'd ever tasted - it had the texture of fresh soba. It was chewy and tender. It wasn't mushy or sticky. It was perfect.

So you think you want to try this out

Of course, you do need to prepare ahead to use this technique. Hydrating pasta takes at least an hour to rinse of the sticky surface starches and accelerate cooking time - so planning is a must. If you hydrate your pasta as you prepare the rest of your meal, and save cooking the pasta until the end, you can use the technique at meal time. Because you can hold the hydrated pasta up to three days, a meal planned in advance can be simplified with the technique. The technique is passive and the hydrating pasta only needs attention when it needs to be removed from the water it is soaking in. The pasta will disintegrate if hydrated for too long. You'll need to hydrate larger pasta shapes longer - every pasta type is different.

There's a bunch of food science behind why this works, but I'm no food scientist and any attempt I make to explain it will fall short. If you're really interested in rice science and food tech, you can always read this book.

In any case, pre-hydrating your gluten-free pasta will improve it. Even if it is just the time it takes to prepare and serve it. And if you try the flavorful hydration liquid, you'll make it far more interesting than you ever imagined it could be.

*Note on reheating: if you use a microwave to reheat your pasta, I don't care how it's been pre-hydrated, it will always turn out gummy because of the rice flour. To avoid gummy, sticky, mushy and dissolving pasta, reheat your cooked pasta either in hot water, sauce heated up in a pan, or, if already sauced, gently in a covered sauce pan, stirring and checking as you reheat it. Once it starts gumming up, there's no going back. Such is the danger of high temp high heat reheating of rice-based pasta.

April 27, 2011

I'm not an over-forager. I pick carefully, digging out but one or two of these fragrant relatives of the lily from each patch I discover. I try and take only as much as I will need for a single meal. There's no point in getting greedy, even if the season comes and goes in just a matter of weeks. Ramps take five years to grow from seed to bulb. If a patch is picked bare, the ramp will not return unless intentionally replanted.

I can't say where I found these. Foraging locations need to be kept secret lest the less responsible exploit them for gain. But I will give you one clue: as I was driving I spotted ramps growing along the side of the road not far from where I found these. These were deeper in the woods.

April 22, 2011

I love chocolate cookies. I know a lot of people out there with egg allergies love a good, fudgy chocolate cookie too.

Most egg replacers don't go quite the distance - they'll bind but they don't provide body. Using my tapioca gel (recipe and explanation here) I developed a gluten-free, vegan cookie that's just like the original except for one thing: these won't make you ill if you are allergic to the Big 8.

I made four versions of these cookies until I came up with a taste and texture I liked. All of the versions worked, there was just something a little off about each one of them until one of my colleagues helped me identify what it was: in my gluten-free baking mix, which is made entirely from whole grains (brown rice, quinoa, buckwheat and millet, finely ground and purchased here), I had neglected to toast the quinoa. A quick toasting in the oven remedied that flavor issue (note: even if quinoa is washed before milling, it still needs a little time in the oven).

These cookies are pretty easy to make and are very fudgy. You can make them cakier by adding about 1/4 C more flour to my basic recipe, outlined below. You'll want to press them down a bit if you go the cakey route - otherwise they'll be very tall).

If you have time to refrigerate them overnight, it will allow the dough to absorb moisture and make it a little easier to handle.

If you don't want to use grapeseed or sunflower/safflower oil, use coconut oil - but melt it first. The dough will be a little different, a little easier to handle, but the texture will change from what I have in the pictures above and below. Coconut oil is solid at room temperature and behaves differently in baked goods from liquid fats. This is not a problem, just a choice!

***Gluten-free flour blend: I used 1/2 cup + 3 tablespoons TOASTED QUINOA FLOUR, 1/4 cup millet flour, 1/2 cup brown rice flour and 1/2 cup light buckwheat flour. You can use anything you like, but keep in mind that not all flours are created equal. You may need to add a few T of flour to this mix if your mix has a lot of starch in it.

Make tapioca gel: in a sauce pan combine tapioca starch with cold water and stir until dissolved. Over high heat, stir gel until it goes from thin and cloudy to thick and translucent. Remove from heat immediately - don't boil. Cool (you can speed this up by whisking it or pouring it into a glass baking pan with lots of surface area and putting it in the refrigerator).

Combine sugar, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Mix until combined. Add the oil and vanilla and the cooled tapioca gel. It will look a little spongy. Mix until evenly combined. Stir in all the flour at once and mix. Add chocolate chips, if desired. Mix until dough is uniform.

If the dough is very soft and pourable, add a little bit of extra baking mix to the bowl, one tablespoon at a time. It should be sticky but pliable, not hard and not too wet.

If possible, allow to sit overnight. Flours will absorb some of the water and it will become a little easier to handle. It is not necessary to do so, however. The dough will still be sticky either way. Just a little less so if you can let it sit overnight.

Here's where it helps if you have a small ice cream scoop - it'll make forming cookies easier.

With that small, .25 oz ice cream scoop (or with a tablespoon) drop small scoops of dough into the confectioner's sugar. Roll in sugar (this is sticky work, okay?) and place on sheet pan, about 12 per pan.

Bake in oven for 12-14 minutes, or until surface is crackled and does not look wet.

Allow to cool. Enjoy or store in an airtight container up to 3 days.

For a more 'cakey' cookie, add in up to 1/4 C extra of gluten-free baking mix. It will not spread as much.